The landscape of computer file system technologies is ever-changing to meet the flexibility demands being made by end-users of computer systems. One present limitation seen in conventional file systems is related to the inability or difficulty of easily expanding and contracting the size of logical volumes. For example, a simple partition that is backed by a single hard drive cannot shrink or grow in size without migrating data associated with the partition off of the hard drive, resizing the partition, and then copying the migrated data back into the partition. More recent technologies have attempted to alleviate this problem by enabling logical volumes to easily be expanded in size. For example, the ZFS file system by Sun Microsystems® enables administrators to expand the size of a logical volume by increasing the amount of physical storage space that is available to the logical volume (e.g., by adding another hard drive). However, this approach does not enable logical volumes to, for example, to utilize free space that may be available in neighboring partitions that are backed by the same group of storage devices.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is a technique directed to enabling storage space to be shared between logical volumes.